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OSWALD Newsletter Archives (by issue #, click to view)

The Open Source Law Weekly Digest or OSWALD first launched
late in 2002. Since then it has been regularly providing updates on
all things open source related. The focus of this newsletter is on
business, rather than technical developments in open source. Another
strong component of the newsletter is IP news, as it is of interest
to me and has an effect on open source.

The stories this week are largely reprises on earlier stories, such as the UK's move to ditch MS Office and OpenDaylight. There are a number of Android/embedded Linux/Chromebook related stories this week.

Maude isn't the first to realise that vast amounts of public money is spent on computer programmes that could be found for free. Even with bulk discounts, setting up thousands upon thousands of civil service computers with Microsoft software is a real drain on finances.

engineers at Facebook have developed a way of protecting the company's rather popular Android apps when they're stored on SD cards, and they're now sharing this security tool with the world at large, letting other software developers protect their apps in similar ways.

The source is to be licensed under both GPLv3 and GLPv2 — the parts of kGraft that interact with the GPLv2-licensed kernel will have GPLv2 licencing, with the parts that touch the GCC compiler using GPLv3.

When OpenDaylight got started, the core of the project was the SDN controller. Since April, the project itself has also expanded dramatically and now includes a broad spectrum of SDN components. The Hydrogen release itself has three separate editions, each designed for certain target use cases.

In-Home Streaming was part of the SteamOS announcement Valve made back in September and beta invites to the functionality have been sent to some people around the internet. Luckily I was part of that group and I can share some of it with you!

Back in June we noted that, unlike Barracuda, Mako Server shipped without source code. This is no longer the case. You can now take the C source code and compile the web application server for your embedded Linux platform of choice.

In other words to make it clear that RackSpace practices what it preaches, Rackspace employees are allowed to contribute to any open-source project even if it directly competes with initiatives officially backed by Rackspace.

Robbie Cooke, RebellionHi Liam, As an indie studio and big PC developer we like to support as many platforms- and therefore gamers - as we can. We’re very much looking at Mac and Linux, and we recently attended the Steam Dev Days presentation about Steam boxes.

Looking at these arguments as a potential consumer, none of them are really that convincing. The Steam client on Windows already has a Big Picture mode that makes it work just as well as a "part of the living room" as SteamOS does.